


The Distant Triumph Song

by primeideal



Category: Oxford Time Travel Universe - Connie Willis
Genre: All Saints' Day, Gen, Ghosts, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2020-10-29 07:54:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20793242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/primeideal/pseuds/primeideal
Summary: “So you’re saying Montoya unearthed a medieval virus,” Kivrin summarized. “And my parents told me my degree would never be good for anything in the real world.”





	The Distant Triumph Song

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lirin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/gifts).

Whatever would happen to Kivrin _had_ happened over seven hundred years ago, Dunworthy knew, and there was no way he could change it. Yet she would return weeks in the future rather than the moment she had departed. For her the elapsed time was real and still taking its toll.

“You’re sure you set it properly?” he asked Badri.

“Yes,” said Badri, with no energy to become indignant. He was a student and Dunworthy was a professor. If the latter would doubt his credentials, that was the way of every century.

“Good lad.”

If he’d known that Badri’s sniffle was not just the winter cold—but he could not have known, of course. Even for those who tore and patched stitches in time, information flowed from the past, and there was no room for regret.

* * *

He was working late in his office, away from the Americans and their incessant complaining, away from Mary and the child she’d been saddled with. In the solitude there was only the mundanity of university duties: undergraduates asking if they could pink-slip their way into his seminar the coming quarter, an automated reminder that his course evaluations were available, a pointed request from the Dean to serve on a committee for diversity and inclusion. The last made Dunworthy chuckle. He did not think he had a great deal to offer, unless familiarity with fourteenth-century Catholic liturgy counted as a minority religious viewpoint.

“Too late,” someone was moaning. “It’s too late...”

“It’s entirely too late for you to be working here, I quite agree,” said Dunworthy, shaking himself loose from his monitor. “Can I help you?”

“Not me.”

Well, that was straightforward enough. He made his way out of the building, rolling his eyes in observance of the quarantine. There were no other lights on.

* * *

“I need to see Badri,” Dunworthy pleaded. “I think he was trying to tell me something, something about Kivrin.”

“You worry too much,” said Mary. “There’s nothing you can do for them.”

He took it as a rebuke—surely both of them had concerns of their own. Badri, based on the chronology, could easily have been patient zero. If anything, he should have been retracing his _own_ timeline rather than Kivrin’s. And Kivrin, of course, was probably flirting with noblemen and eagerly jotting down their dialectal variations. She would laugh at his fretting; laughter was a pleasure the young could afford.

It had not always been thus, he reminded himself. Perhaps she would return chastened, feeling guilty for the luxuries of childhood she had previously enjoyed once she’d seen overworked and underbathed children rushed to come of age and marry off.

Or perhaps not. She had grown up in the shadow of the pandemics, after all. Every century had its horrors, multiheaded forms that shaped the minds of children left in their wake, that resisted narration and quantification with equal evasiveness.

* * *

Even in the hospital, Dunworthy could recognize how far healthcare had progressed since the 1300s. Kivrin’s contemps would not have the benefit of trained professionals to synthesize cures, painkillers to numb the worst extremes, modern nutrition to sustain them during their recovery. People were sick and dying around him, he knew, but he refused to slip into self-pity. He would not trade that imperfect care for another.

What scared him was how little they had advanced in terms of recriminations. Being confined to his hospital bed was almost a respite from the entitled change-ringers griping about their vacation plans. People who never understood time travel blamed the virus on having slipped through from 1320, a new kind of anti-intellectual sideswipe. And as it became increasingly clear that Badri was the primary source of the virus, there were mutterings trying to discredit the young technician, portray him as a dangerous outsider.

But when Badri dropped by, it was with no time for either party’s apologies or regret. “Kivrin’s in 1348,” he said. “I was tired, I set the coordinates wrong.”

“1348?” Dunworthy repeated. The nurses would shush him if they heard, try to make him rest, but Badri’s voice would have been urgent even if Dunworthy weren’t already consumed with worry.

“There’s a backup coordinate. You’ll have to log in through my account, I have administrator access.”

“You set it yourself, you’re trained. No one will hold a mistake against you.” It was true, he realized; he was not angry at Badri, only dully relieved that his paranoia had not been completely unfounded.

“They won’t—there’s a new academic term—you have to go, as soon as they release you.”

He memorized the passwords, echoed them to himself when he was only half-conscious. It would not be the strangest thing half-delirious men had babbled. In the worst throes, fearing for someone else was the only surefire way to remember that his pain was temporary.

* * *

Colin harried him through the snow, heard the summons of the bell-tower and spotted Kivrin’s frail figure. They stumbled through the drop, and Dunworthy scarcely sensed the warmth of the lab where they emerged. But it didn’t matter, as long as Kivrin was safe in her own time.

Of course they had to quarantine her, too. Never mind that she had already had the new-old virus, had endured it with little more than fourteenth-century medicine (and somewhat more substantial fourteenth-century faith). It was like the first moon landing, he supposed; no one had ever returned from that distance, so better to take every precaution until it became commonplace.

At least they let her drop off her recording, the anachronistically-named “Doomsday Book.” “You might not want to listen to it just yet,” she warned him. “I’m sure I got a little overwhelmed at times.”

He ignored her, of course. She would give many more accounts and depositions, be interviewed and counselled, but he could not wait to follow her voice through time.

* * *

It was a sign of normalcy that Dunworthy did not flinch or sigh in relief to see Kivrin on his threshold. She might have been an undergrad late to office hours, or a custodian reminding him of the recycling schedule.

But it was Kivrin, in the flesh. “Are you going to the memorial?”

“Which one?”

“Badri’s. Took a while for his extended family to get into town, but they wanted to be here.”

“Badri can’t have died,” he blurted. He had been unconscious, yes, but he’d caught up on everything! Surely he would have heard.

Kivrin tilted her head to the side. “He was—one of the first victims. That’s what Latimer said.”

_What does Latimer know_? Dunworthy almost snapped, but instead ran a quick net search for a non-paywalled roll of the dead. And there he was, reduced to pixels: _Badri Chaudhury_.

But that date couldn’t be right. He’d seen him, _spoken_ with him—

“You don’t have to,” Kivrin said. “I know you’ve got a lot on your mind. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t forget.”

“I appreciate the reminder,” he said dully.

He stood toward the back throughout the ceremony, not wanting to be drawn into conversation with grieving relations. The tributes were exactly what one would expect for someone who had died. And yet Dunworthy could not help but remember Badri’s urgent insistence, his brown cheeks pallid with illness. Had he hallucinated the whole thing, mad with worry over Kivrin? Surely in his stupor he would have summoned Mary from his memory, not the anxious technician.

Certainly not Badri’s password.

* * *

Dunworthy would say this for the novice change-ringers: they did not have the hand-eye coordination to embarrass themselves in the tower, so their beleaguered instructor was trying to teach them a plain bob on handbells first. This, while tedious, was less of a headache than the alternative. Dunworthy was sore enough looking over waivers for Jian’s proposed trip to the Song dynasty.

Almost a year had come and gone; it was the first Sunday of November, and the campus church was observing All Saints’ Day. “It must be easy for you,” he said, “trusting in the great cloud of witnesses—you’ve seen people here, just separated by time.”

“Every century brings things that would have seemed miraculous to the one before,” Kivrin pointed out. “Doesn’t make belief any easier.”

“True.” He tried to focus on the strains of Vaughn Williams’ _Sine nomine_ and ignore the rhythm of the bells.

“What’s on your mind?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, then at her skeptical gaze rolled his eyes. “You’ll think I’m mad. Madder than usual.”

“I don’t much care if you’re mad as long as you can write me a recommendation letter,” said Kivrin, straight-faced.

She had already shared so much pain that was not her own to begin with. Perhaps she could understand this burden, too. “I saw Badri in the hospital.”

“What?”

“After—he should have been dead. He was the one who told me how to save you. If he was a ghost, or a saint, I don’t know what that _means_.”

Kivrin hid a smile. “You associate with _time travellers _on a regular basis.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel any more stable?”

“And you don’t even consider the possibility he could have come from the past?”

“That’s not how it works!” Dunworthy immediately rebutted. “You’re as daft as the people who thought _you _brought the plague forward.”

“I did what?” Kivrin blinked. “I’ve been called a lot of things, but that’s a new one.”

She’d have missed it in the debrief, of course, like so much else. “There were some crackpots,” he began, and found himself relaying another fragment of the twenty-first century’s tedium.

“So you’re saying Montoya unearthed a medieval virus,” Kivrin summarized. “And my parents told me my degree would never be good for anything in the real world.”

“More or less.”

“And it was Badri who brought it to campus, and his spirit dropped in on you to try and make amends. Sounds perfectly reasonable when you put it that way.”

“Are you making mock?” Dunworthy began, then checked himself. So what if she was? She’d certainly earned the right.

“To those who are perishing, many words are foolishness,” she quoted. “And wisdom at the same time.”

It was not much condolence; it did not change the fact that Badri and Mary and so many others would never again walk the same quadrangles. But he felt himself occupying every cross-section of time at once, with Kivrin in the cold and Mary in the labs, and someday perhaps, with Badri again in a greater choir.


End file.
